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Cara Dillon

Cara Dillon was created to deliver a music fan experience that would stimulate engagement by delivering a variety of content in a visually striking and easy to use manner.

Key requirements were a Playlist Mini-Player that would appear on all pages but work independently of the main Music page player, allowing Cara to prioritise which tracks were accessible quickly after landing on the Home Page.

The PR team needed to select different content and push it to the Home page as a teaser, as well as streamlining the workflow needed to manage a music artist site that would change on a daily basis.

A key requirement in the mobile age was to ensure the site could perform effectively in smart phones.

Cara Dillon is an internationally acclaimed Folk artist and one of Ireland’s finest singers.

She’s won countless awards and accolades including “Album Of The Year” at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, The Meteor Music Award for “Best Irish Female”, and Tatler’s “Woman Of The Year in Music” and has appeared in prestigious concert halls and at festivals the world over.

Always looking to introduce her voice and music to new listeners, Cara’s topped the charts with dance remixes, guest appearances and, more recently, presented her songs with full orchestral backing bringing her music to an entirely new audience.

With the launch of her first album in 5-years, and a Sony Music backed push into the US market, Cara required a new website to not only promote ‘A Thousand Hearts’, but to give her management and PR team a content managed platform that was powerful, effortless to use and mobile friendly.

Drupal's flexible foundation helped us deliver a rich and rewarding experience for Cara's worldwide audience, whether they are viewing on desktop, tablet or smart phone.

Why Drupal Was Chosen:

Leading music companies such as Warner Brothers and Sony Music Entertainment have already taken the step to commission client sites in Drupal, and Drupal is highly regarded in the industry. It was evident on analysing the brief that the flexibility to create multiple content types was needed and this is something pre-configured CMS systems cannot provide as effectively.

Key Modules, Theme, and Distribution Used:

DRUMA (Drupal For Musical Artists) is a powerful distribution designed by D. Agency to provide musical artists with a baseline set of functionality out of the box. Cara Dillon is the first artist to take advantage of DRUMA to get her music upfront and centre as fast as possible.
Getting the music upfront was achieved with the JPlayer library, selected as the delivery medium and heavily customised in the theme layer. Ajax loading of pages was setup, making use of the Ajax links API module.
A custom theme was created for the distribution which sub-themes Omega 3. This was in turn sub-themed to allow for site-specific customisation.
For the admin theme, Ember (part of the spark distribution) was chosen in order to take advantage of the great UX work that has gone into it. A separate subtheme was created for Druma, which allowed the admin experience to be better customised for the tasks that site editors and administrators would be undertaking.
The Masonry library was used throughout the site to make content lists more visual and engaging whilst Front end architecture was handled with Omega 3, Context, Delta and Display Suite to allow for incredible fine tuning of responsive layouts whilst not impacting performance.
Media and associated modules were used to add asset management and reuse capabilities.
A lot of effort was put into the editor experience, with modules such as Draggable views, Views Bulk Operations, References dialog and Fieldgroup called into play in order to create an administration interface as optimised as possible for the tasks in hand.
Toolbar Megamenu was implemented to greatly enhance administrator navigation

Why these Modules, Theme, and Distribution were Chosen:

The DRUMA distribution helped us hit the ground running and cut development time from weeks to days.

Users can land on the Home Page and continue to listen to tracks from the Playlist when moving through the site.

Content can be posted once in admin, then reused in various areas of the site to speed up editorial workflow.